Conventional job management methods and job execution methods which apply details of the results of executing a preceding job to a subsequent job include pipeline processing used by a UNIX (registered trademark) shell and DOS commands. With pipeline processing, job execution result details outputted from a preceding job are connected to the input of a subsequent job.
Also, it has been proposed to apply the idea of pipeline processing to jobs executed by multiple computers on a network (e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-102449).
However, the conventional job management method which connects the output of the preceding job to the input of the subsequent job using pipeline processing has the following problems. Specifically, the conventional job management method cannot be applied to the determination of a job to be executed next based on an execution result, such as failure or success, of the preceding job. Also, the execution result details of a preceding job whose execution has already been finished cannot be applied to a subsequent job.